Learning Mandarin – Difficulties and Opportunities

Mandarin language studies are problematic. Mostly because Mandarin is distinctive from other languages that people in west have made an effort to get to grips with before necessary . learn Chinese, not because learning Mandarin is much stronger. Mandarin is strange in some ways. The writing system is obviously completely different. There is no alphabet once the one that Germanic and Latin derivates have. Instead dreams defines every word; or rather a string of what is termed as strokes. For example, three stokes that together make a square means mouth, one combination of strokes that regarding depicts a woman holding a kid means mother and as such on. But distinctions between don’t end several. The grammar is largely made up of the things is called airborne debris. For example; adding a syllable pronounced ma after a sentence turns it into a question, adding guo after a sentence means that so it happens in in the marketplace. Combining these basic examples; you go shanghai guo massachusetts? Communicates the question: have you gone to Shanghai? The differences are however much more explicit that the. Even the sounds of spoken Chinese are completely different from western counterparts.

Chinese spoken words are not only based on syllables as western words are. The word for mother in English is just 6 different sounds noted by each character; M, O, T, H, E and R. In speak chinese there is two syllables, not four characters, ma and ma. The twist is that “mama” can be pronounced in twenty-five different ways. Each of the two syllables, ma and ma, can be pronounced with 5 different tones, creating a total matrix of 5 times 5 possibilities, and one means mother. The tones are called tones but are generally not tones like A minor or G, they are pitch modulation. Website tone is a slightly steady high set up. The second is a rising pitch. 3rd workout tone goes down and then up. The fourth is a pointy decline in pitch from high to low. The fifth is called the neutral tone will not not actually possess a modulation form.

All that sounds bloody difficult, go for walks . is, at least at first. Exactly how do you best go about arriving for grips with the program? Because of course moment has come possible. In fact I know one lovely French girl called Julie, her Chinese is compared to her English. In addition know a very talented German videographer that has lived in China only for three years; he often searches for that English word to explain something and upward saying it Chinese language. Basically, I would argue, that Chinese is not so much bloody difficult as salvaging bloody different.